Monday, March 07, 2005

Almost good enough

I am at a point that I almost consider good enough. The FM part is supported as well. The state machine seems to produce the correct notes, the only strange thing is that the volume is extremely low - I had to push it to 2.0 gain and lower all the others to make it reasonable. There might be a bug somewhere in the way the FM parameters are set - this stuff is much more complex than the PSG.

At this point, I'm more worried about the protection in some games than by the sound, which is coming along nicely.

It has to be said that this simulation I've written was mostly for personal education and for reference. I am 99% certain the the NMK004 internal ROM can be extracted, using a technique I thought of. Theoretically it's very simple, but the process will require some hardware work.

And of course, once the ROM is extracted, we'll have to see if it can be ran in MAME. It supposedly is a TLCS-90, which is one of the few CPUs not yet supported by MAME, so an emulator for that CPU would have to be written. Which would be a good thing because it would also allow to support Mahjong If and sound in Rapid Hero.Having the simulation code available might help while writing the CPU emulator.